Comment by jzemeocala

I think you're overestimating how much the average person knows about how technology operates today, or 30 years ago, or 1000. In some sense, we have been living with magic and tech priests since the Romans built the aqueducts. I wouldn't be surprised if widespread, cheap AI makes it easier for the average person to learn how things around them work, if they are so inclined.

If religion and human technology are any guide, there will be a lot of this but it will never be the entire sum of human activity. Some of us are just too damn curious. We go straight for the curtain. I refuse to believe that very human pattern won’t continue.

"In the distant future, humans live in a computer-aided society and have forgotten the fundamentals of mathematics, including even the rudimentary skill of counting.

The Terrestrial Federation is at war with Deneb, and the war is conducted by long-range weapons controlled by computers which are expensive and hard to replace. Myron Aub, a low grade Technician, discovers how to reverse-engineer the principles of pencil-and-paper arithmetic by studying the workings of ancient computers which were programmed by human beings, before bootstrapping became the norm—a development which is later dubbed "Graphitics"." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power

I'm not convinced that's where we are heading. LLMs are really good at explaining things ("explain to me like I'm a 5 year old").

I've been writing code since my teens, I've studied assembly... yet the fact that _things_ start happening when I press the power button on my computer are pure magic to me and I like it this way.

I started digging a few times, but, I prefer the "magic".

I think it will be just like Dr. Know in Spielberg's "AI" movie from 2001 — I found it amazing how the oracle, though giving mystic-sounding obfuscated answers, was actually intelligent enough to figure out (a) what the kid was asking for and (2) give the correct answer.

Kids grew up on this man, they are master prompters. You’ll be asking them to fix your holoTV and your crypto phone when you’re too old to read the brainfuck.

Honestly, don't think so. That's certainly the path one might extrapolate if the next generation grows up exactly the same way as the current generation, but that's not how it works.

They will be exposed to this technology throughout childhood as their brains develop and they will develop unique ways to work with it we don't entirely understand just like GenY with cell phones and GenX with home computers. I think you deeply underestimate how adaptable we are as a species, but if you consider that we've been running the same OS and Bios as a species for the past ~40K years, perhaps you might be more optimistic?

Give it six more months and you'll have a second "oh shit" moment when you peek behind the curtain of LLMs shitting the bed.

I guess tech unsavvy people who are easily amused by LLM tricks will always exist, but they'll be an increasingly smaller minority as time goes on.

Software that had a data moat because it was hard to integrate with or migrate off of will have that moat disappear. A web site is a client now. Building data migration too for all of you competitors is easier now.

Right now, software is protected by the attacker not having enough competence. If that's over, the logical next step is using real encryption.

E.g. a synth has a public key embedded. To change settings, you upload them to the vendor, who blesses them with their private key.

Hacking such a synth requires either jailbreaking the synth, or the vendor losing their key . Both can be mitigated with tamper resistant hardware.

We're well ahead on this path already, I assume AI will accellerate it. This is very bad news for the right to repair.

I think companies with valuable data to scrape (e.g. media companies) will eventually lock it behind APIs that verify Apple App Attest or Google Play Integrity. And deprecate websites which are easily scraped too. Then it will be useless to reverse engineer APIs used by apps and we will have to run the unmodified client on an unmodified OS.

I think GP is talking about cracking, not pen testing.

This is pretty much a given anyway. Making reverse engineering tools is already likely to get you sued by someone so model makers are apt to slow down the ability of their tools to reverse engineer to avoid the lawsuits themselves.

I'm trying to not do the naive pdf creation, where each page is just the raster. Trying to keep the JBIG2 bilevel, as I get better quality at lower file size. Using jpeg2000 too, where appropriate, but the pdfs are still x2.5 the size of the original. Though, I can have it spit out decrypted djvu files that are exactly the same filesize... I just don't like that format for archival.

If you want the Rolling Stone or Playboy archives decrypted, ReconSuave on github has tools to do those. I got tired of waiting for him to do The New Yorker though.

Okay, a couple of hours later…thanks for the hint as that's fucking dark magic ;) and I now have access to the entire New Yorker again after around 15 years :)

I use Claude on the desktop, and only occasionally Claude Code. It's the one that recommended Ghidra. Walked me through the install. Taught me the basics (G to go to an address, etc). Would tell me where to go, and what to paste back to it. It eventually converged on where to find the iv and credentials and so forth (after acting confused for awhile), and then wrote the python script for me that decrypts. I'd like to think my questions (and challenges to its assertions) were intelligent enough to spur it towards the solution, but self-flattery is all that is.

The dll in question was pretty obvious just from the filename alone that it was where the magic happened.

If you want something similar, you might just start by asking it if it would be feasible to decompile the software in question to reverse engineer the decryption, that you'd heard Ghidra was a big deal. Keep nudging it to guide you along that sort of path.

I take it….

Improvement over all the assholes that tell you „just google it” after you spent two days hitting the wall.